


Hostile Takeover

by swearwollf



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Creepagawa Jr., M/M, Non-consensual Mind Invasion, PTSD, Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-29 14:22:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20798045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swearwollf/pseuds/swearwollf
Summary: Katagawa wants to bring Rhys into the Maliwan family and he's not afraid to resort to force to do it.  Handsome Jack has been biding his time.





	Hostile Takeover

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ruins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruins/gifts).

> thanks to ghost and to sasha for the beta, all remaining mistakes are my own

When Rhys wakes, it's a slow and unpleasant process. His brain feels gummy and confused, but he’s not scared. It’s not a completely foreign feeling; he tries to restrain himself, but sometimes the memories of... Of Him. Sometimes the memories of Him loom too close to the surface and Rhys turns to alcohol to quiet them. Waking up like this is not dissimilar to the mornings after.

On those mornings he always wakes up alone, though. This time, he doesn’t.

Rhys only has a vague sense of his body at first. He’s lying down on a bed and moderately comfortable, but he knows the bed isn’t his own just from the way he sinks into the mattress. He had spared no expense and this one is just a little too soft. His clumsy mind fixates on this first, despite the warm body he can feel seated next to him. A gentle hand touches his face, pushes the hair away from his brow. He’s had this dream before.

“Jack?” His voice limps out of him, tired and aching, cracked open with something like hope. Rhys yearns and dreads in equal measure.

The hand on his brow stills. The voice that answers is familiar, but not the one he anticipated.

“Oh, Rhys,” Katagawa sneers gently, “Still holding a candle for that tired has-been? I expected more from you.”

Rhys levers his eyelids open by degrees. Katagawa’s insidious smile swims in his hazy vision before his situation catches up to him. He tries to reach up and rub his eyes only to come up short. His arms are bound to the bed.

Rhys panics. He tries to do it quietly, but the way his whole body seizes with tension is a dead giveaway. Katagawa’s smile widens, sharp as a blade, flashing eerily perfect white teeth.

“Aw, buddy! You’re so cute when you’re scared!”

“What-what are you doing?” Rhys wants to struggle but he can barely move. He sucks in a breath and it is wet with unshed tears.

“We could have done this the easy way, Rhys. We could have been on the Zanara, kicking back, drinks in our hands. Once Atlas was a subsidiary of Maliwan, I was going to make you Vice President of Beach Drinks!” Katagawa leans over him, face inches away from Rhys’s own. The yellow M in his ECHO-Eye glitters with malevolent glee. “That’s okay, though. We still have time. I have a plan.”

At this, Katagawa reaches for something out of Rhys’s sight. With a pleased hum, he comes back with a long ECHO device connection cable. Rhys wheezes and the tears finally spill over, sliding down his temples and pooling uncomfortably in his ears. Katagawa watches them avidly.

“I’ve admired you for a while now, Rhys.” Katagawa murmurs as he plugs one end of the cable into his own neural port. “I got these cybernetics because of you. Taking Atlas back from the brink of death and making it a major influence on the market again? That takes a lot. You really impressed us.”

Katagawa takes the other end of the cable in hand now, holding it up so the light catches on its end hideously, shining like the edge of a blade. 

“Don’t,” Rhys gasps. His limbs twitch in place, still strapped mercilessly to the bed. Rhys is back in Jack’s chair all those years ago, immobilized, helpless.

“Welcome to the Maliwan family, Rhys. You won’t think about Jack again when I’m done with you.” Katagawa smiles once again, face still too close, as he slides the jack in to Rhys’s neural port like a knife between the ribs.

Katagawa’s invasion of Rhys’s mind is instant and relentless. He swarms Rhys’s head, crawling over his thoughts like a varkid infestation, little insect feet prickling over everything, consuming.

Rhys screams.

Or he thinks he does. His understanding of the world outside his own body is dim, distant. All his failsafes are failing, his firewalls crumpling under Katagawa’s assault. Everything that Rhys throws up to protect himself is destroyed. Rhys flees deeper and deeper into the recesses of his own mind as Katagawa seizes everything behind him.

Rhys runs until there is only one place left to go.

It had taken a lot of careful engineering to build this partition in his systems, a lockbox that he never opens. After everything, after the pain of ripping off his own arm and pulling pulling out his own eye (and god how it had hurt, he has nightmares of it more than anything else from that time, despite everything), Rhys knew Jack was still in him. Broken and scattered throughout his own code, the vestiges of Jack remained. So he built this place in himself to store all those parts, to keep Jack there, with him.

He knows it was a bad decision. He doesn’t regret it. He had kept the eye, too, empty and inert as it was after it left his system. As a reminder.

Rhys never thought of himself as a good person but he’s pretty sure what he’s about to do might be the worst thing he’s ever done. He can’t bring himself to regret that either.

He opens the box.

It’s not the same as opening a door, but that’s what it feels like anyway. All it takes is his hand turning the knob and that door bursts open. His head floods with blue. It crashes around him, bowling him over like a tidal wave and leaving him gasping in its wake. The blue drowns the chittering insectoid swarm of Katagawa’s incursion and chases it back out of Rhys’s mind. 

Rhys drags himself up after it.

When he comes back to his body Katagawa’s face is no longer hovering above his own. The cable that connected them dangles from Rhys’s head, empty at its other end. He hears a kind of gurgling scream from the floor and he turns his head sluggishly to find its origin.

Katagawa is curled into a ball on the floor by Rhys’s bed, twitching and moaning from the aftershocks of whatever Jack did to him. As sorry a sight as it is, Rhys can’t drum up any sympathy for him. Instead he lies there and watches Katagawa suffer while he tries to catch his breath and think of a way to free himself.

By the time Katagawa’s quiet agony dwindles into silence some time later Rhys still doesn’t have any ideas but his head feels a little less muddled. Whatever he was dosed with must be wearing off. At a loss, Rhys goes feeling around in his head for Jack. It’s not unlike tongueing the gum where one has just lost a tooth; everything is sore and empty.

Rhys doesn’t have time to work himself into another panic over this revelation because Katagawa is stirring. Rhys forces himself to be still, even with the drugs wearing off he still isn’t strong enough to break his bindings. He starts bracing himself for round two, a second attack where he will have no secret weapon left. 

Katagawa climbs to his feet unsteadily, swaying like he isn’t used to his legs anymore. Rhys watches in anguish as he rights himself and takes in the room. When he turns his eyes to Rhys he smiles again, but it's not the same as it was before. It’s crooked, awful, familiar. He reaches up and runs a hand through his hair, mussing it from its previously precise hold into a softer backwards sweep. A portion of it comes loose and hangs over his brow like a wing.

Rhys is struck once again by that wretched mixture of hope and dread. 

Jack in Katagawa’s body reaches out, caresses down down Rhys’s faces to tenderly wrap his hand around Rhys’s throat.

“Hey there, pumpkin. Miss me?”


End file.
